Chapter 168:


    Isolde slung her bag over her good shoulder and looked at him.


    “Knitting involves patterns, Daron,” she said coolly. “Something you struggle with — like the pattern of your failures.”


    Daron’s smile faltered.


    “Enjoy the Summit,” she said, her gaze sweeping over him as though he were a piece of lint on the carpet. “The air is thin up there. Try not to suffocate.”


    She turned and walked out. She didn’t look back.


    As the elevator doors slid shut, closing off thest sight of Lancaster Tower, Isolde slumped against the wall. She was exhausted.


    But she was free.


    She walked out of the building into the bright, harsh sunlight of Manhattan and hailed a cab.


    “Where to?”


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    “Carson Dynamics HQ,” she said. Then she pulled out her phone and dialed And. “It’s done. He took the bait. I gave up the seat.”


    “And the badge?” And asked.


    “I’m ready,” Isolde said. “When does it arrive?”


    “Courier should be at yourb in an hour. Wee back.”


    Isolde hung up. She looked at her reflection in the cab window. She looked tired, pale, and broken. But the woman staring back at her had fire in her eyes.


    The elevator ride down felt like a descent from one hell into another. In the sterile, mirrored walls, Isolde saw a stranger — her face pale, her eyes shadowed with exhaustion, the white ster of the cast a stark symbol of her vulnerability.


    But beneath the surface, a cold resolve was hardening into steel. Grayson thought he had won. He thought he had taken everything.


    He was wrong.


    As the cab sped toward the Carson Dynamics building, Isolde’s mind was already racing — calcting variables, running scenarios. Belle on stage. The wed prototype. The investors. The DOD. It was aplex equation, and she was about to solve for X, where X stood for Grayson’splete and utter humiliation.


    Her phone buzzed. A text from Grayson: Credentials transferred. Don’t make a scene at the Summit.


    A threat disguised as a warning. She didn’t bother to reply. Instead, she opened a secure messaging app and sent a single word to Harper.


    Execute.


    A momentter, the reply came back.


    Phase one initiated. The breadcrumbs areid.


    Isolde leaned her head back against the seat and closed her eyes. The game had been reset. Grayson was ying checkers. She was ying three-dimensional chess.


    The cab pulled up to the familiar entrance of her family’spany, now under the Orbital umbre. The building felt different now — safer, stronger. It was her fortress.


    She walked through the lobby, ignoring the curious nces at her cast, and didn’t stop at her new corner office with its sweeping view. She went down instead. To the basement. To theb. To her true home.


    The moment she stepped inside, the familiar smell of ozone and hot metal washed over her, calming her frayed nerves. This was where she belonged — not in boardrooms filled with lies, but here, surrounded by the beautiful, immutablews of physics.


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